Wk 4 Discussion Managing Stress
WEEK 4 Lecture 1 “Motivating Associates”
Motivating Associates
Hello Class! As we start this week’s lecture, I hope you’re starting to notice a trend. Each lecture starts off with a goal – what we want to accomplish in the following paragraphs. This idea of goal-setting, regardless of the task at hand, is a critical element of success! Whether it’s a phone call, a meeting, or a visit to local grocery store, I always strive to have a specific goal in mind at the onset.
Okay, now let’s press on to the goal of this lecture – to gain an understanding of how to motivate associates. We’ll discuss five specific ways to motivate employees followed by a mind-boggling example from the hair salon industry as discussed in your text. On pages 195-202, Hitt, Miller, and Colella provide a practical list of motivation practices as described below:
Find Meaningful Individual Rewards – tailor individual rewards to individual needs and desires, consider both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, intrinsic examples include satisfaction based on exciting and challenging work, feelings of accomplishment, extrinsic examples include pay increases, bonuses, pay level, job security, job titles.
Tie Rewards to Performance – encourages desired behavior, performance measurement is critical to accurate linkage with rewards, can be financial or non-financial rewards.
Redesign Jobs (Job Enlargement and Job Enrichment) – goal is to make jobs more meaningful, job enlargement involves adding tasks that are similar in complexity relative to the current tasks, job enrichment is making a job more motivating by increasing responsibility
Provide Feedback – should be provided in conjunction with goals, regular intervals, be specific, from a credible source, focus on the performance and not the individual when delivering.
Clarify Expectations and Goals – Ah, refer back to the first paragraph of this lecture! You must know the destination before embarking on the journey to get there!
Now that we have an understanding of some of the most practical techniques to motivate associates, let’s look at an unexpected example from the hair salon industry. Please draw your attention to the Experiencing Organizational Behavior segment on page 194 of the text title “Making Visible Changes”. Visible Changes is a hair salon company based on Houston, TX. As you can see from the lead-in paragraph, this is not your normal hair salon. A hairdresser making a total of a quarter million dollars (includes her $40k bonus) just doesn’t seem feasible. As my grandpa used to say when he worked on cars, “let’s look under the hood”, or delve deeper in the workings of Visible Changes, to understand how a company in an industry not known for high pay can pull this off.
Considering the backdrop of motivation practices provided above, which of these does Visible Changes engage in that makes it so successful? It’s obvious they tie performance to rewards – commissions and bonuses are based on specific criteria such as repeat customers and products sold. Visible Changes has also done a fantastic job at clarifying expectations and goals. For instance, there are different levels of hair stylists. Each level (such as senior cutter and master cutter) has a requisite set of goals that must be met (such as number of haircuts, repeat customers, and continuous learning hours) before a hairstylist can move to the next level. The company has also been successful at finding meaningful individual rewards to include profit-sharing, public recognition, and travel to interesting locations. The company even offered to pay tuition to medical school for any children of employees…what a perk!
Let’s further extend this discussion to the public sector and Federal government employees. Within the last few years, Federal employees have been subjected to multiple years without cost of living adjustments (also known as the “pay freeze”), a government shutdown, furloughs, reductions in travel and training, and elimination of bonuses (although these appear to be coming back in certain agencies). The bottom line is that the Federal workforce has been subjected to various practices that effectively decreased their motivation.
Here’s the question…with such a brutal few years, can the government environment be changed and motivation practices implemented to improve employee morale? Are there complicating factors in the public sector which do not appear in the private sector? Yes, the environment can be changed, however, for meaningful changes to occur, there needs to be some compromising between the Executive and Legislative branches. The Federal government is a unique organization in that there is not one person who makes the ultimate decisions. Instead, the government is structured to provide adequate checks and balances. While the “balance of power” concept makes us strong as a nation, it provides numerous challenges from an employee motivation standpoint.
If you were a government manager, which of the motivation practices might you use considering the circumstances? One place to start might be to find meaningful individual rewards. For many, government service is a calling and they do it for patriotic reasons rather than for financial gain.
References
Hitt, M. A., Miller, C. C., & Colella, A. (2015). Organizational Behavior (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
WEEK 4 Lecture 2 “Stress Management”
Class, I’m proud of the efforts you’ve shown thus far in class! Completion of this week marks the halfway point, a significant achievement considering the difficulty and time commitment for this class. Well done! The second lecture this week revolves around a topic from Chapter Seven, stress – how to identify it and how to manage it. My hope is that you can reflect on your own situation (and those you care about) and not only identify stress concerns but take a proactive approach to managing them so you live a long, productive, happy, and healthy life!
Have you ever found yourself feeling uneasy after a day at the office? Do you often experience physiological, emotional, or behavioral discomfort as a result of your work environment? If so, you’re likely experiencing symptoms of stress. Here are some the common symptoms of stress as noted by Hitt, Miller, and Colella on page 215 of the text:
Common Physical Symptoms: headaches, muscle tension and pain, chest pain, fatigue, change in sex drive, upset stomach, lowered resistance to infection and disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, increased metabolism and burning of body fat.
Common Emotional Symptoms: anxiety or worry, restlessness, lack of motivation, lack of focus, irritability, anger, sadness, depression.
Common Behavioral Symptoms: alertness and excitement, increase in energy, overeating, undereating, angry or aggressive outbursts, drug or alcohol abuse, tobacco use, social withdrawal.
If you haven’t experienced any of the aforementioned symptoms, I want your job :) Seriously though, I suspect we’ve all experienced a number of these stress effects at one time or another in our lives. So now that you’ve diagnosed your own situation, it’s time to prescribe a solution. The best solutions are typically a two-pronged approach from both the individual and the organization. Regardless of how much effort an individual invests in reducing stress, the organization must be willing to make changes to keep good employees over the long-term. A good organization will make changes to accommodate employees, even if it costs them money in the short-term, because of the long-term benefits and reduction in healthcare costs associated with stress.
Let’s start by looking at changes you can personally make to lessen stress. The first is diet. What does yours look like? Do you often eat junk food and make unhealthy choices at fast food restaurants? To use an analogy…would you fuel your car which takes unleaded gasoline with corn syrup? Of course not...the car won’t make the trip and will likely sustain permanent damage. This is no different than your body. By fueling your body with unhealthy food, you’re sure to contribute to stress. The text notes that diet impacts alertness, energy levels, and overall well-being.
Another life change you can make immediately to lessen your stress levels is the implementation of an exercise routine. Rather than go into the numerous exercise routines out there, I’ll focus on the different categories of exercise. Generally speaking, exercise can be broken down into three major groups, what have been coined the “three Ss” – stamina, strength, stretching. Hitt, Miller, and Colella define moderate exercise as 30 minutes of activity three to four times a week. The key here is not to get burnt out and be sure to use moderation.
For instance, if you’ve been literally laying on the couch after work for the last year, you’ll not want to go out and run 5 miles. Rather, you might start with walking a half mile 3 times a week for the first couple of weeks and slowly increasing rates and mileage after that.
So, even if you do everything right from an individual level, that will only go so far. There must be action on your organization’s part to help lessen the stress as well. Page 230 of the text provides various actions that can be taken by the organization to reduce stress as listed below:
Increased autonomy & control
Proper compensation
Maintain job demands/requirements at healthy levels
Ensure associates have adequate skills to keep up-to-date with technical changes in the workplace
Increased associate involvement in decision making
Improve physical working conditions
Provide job security and career development
Provide flexible work schedules
Improve communication to avoid uncertainty and ambiguity
Now it’s time to sound like a broken record again…project, project, project! Has your organization instituted any of these measures? Might your organization benefit from instituting additional measures. As you should recall from your project assignment, you are to identify a process/structure/environment that needs improvement and provide an intervention recommendation for improvement. As an example, let’s say you work 12 hour shifts and your analysis shows that workplace accidents typically happen the last couple of hours of the shift due to exhaustion.
One proposed intervention might be to provide flexible work schedules where you can choose between eight, ten, or twelve hour shifts. This is your chance in a friendly environment to be the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of your organization. The possibilities are endless!
References
Hitt, M. A., Miller, C. C., & Colella, A. (2015). Organizational Behavior (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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